Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 22 September 2021

 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Beyond the confines of neo-Platonic philosophy, the special significance of the value triad of goodness, truth, and beauty has also been recognized by a wide diversity of significant writers such as Aquinas, Kant, Diderot, Rousseau, Schelling, Tolstoy, Whitehead, Freud, Gandhi, Sorokin, and Einstein, to name a few. Many spiritual teachers, in both the East and the West, have also extolled this triad of values, including Sri Aurobindo, Rudolf Steiner, Thich Nhat Hanh, Cardinal Newman, and Osho Rajneesh. Sri Aurobindo, for example, describes goodness, truth, and beauty as the “three dynamic images” through which one makes contact with “supreme Reality.” The leading secular writer currently championing this triad is Howard Gardner, whose book, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (New York: Basic Books, 2012) [referenced in the main text].

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Rectilinearity, as Ruskin had similarly demonstrated of clarity, is illusory, and can only be approximated, like clarity, by narrowing the breadth, and limiting the depth, of the perceptual field. Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates, in the late Roman Empire (whose towns and roads are laid out like grids), in Classicism (by contrast with the Baroque, which had everywhere celebrated the curve), in the Industrial Revolution (the Victorian emphasis on ornament and Gothicism being an ultimately futile nostalgic pretence occasioned by the functional brutality and invariance of the rectilinear productions of machines) and in the grid-like environment of the modern city, where that pretence has been dropped.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

Nixon’s career, whatever else one could say of it, had been at least as consistent as Kennedy’s—as that of the liberal hot-cold warrior, Catholic secularist, McCarthyite civil-libertarian, who changed flags often and deftly. Indeed, it was Kennedy’s ease of adjustment that saved him from his own campaign promises and initial vision of the presidency. He had come to that office preaching cold war as a crusade. Domestic satisfaction seemed almost too complete under Ike; the country was affluent, snoozy, no New Deal rhetoric could rouse it; poverty was undiscovered, and black unrest just stirring. Kennedy, with his call for escape from the Eisenhower narcolepsy, had to reduce everything to a contest with Khrushchev.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

It [the "immune system" to certain attitudes] was classical nineteenth-century science and its insistence that science is only a method for determining what is true and not a body of beliefs in itself.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

[A]s Socrates urged against Glaucon, the individual character considered in isolation from its environment is an abstraction, not a really existing thing. What a man does depends only to a limited extent on what kind of man he is. No one can resist the forces of his environment. Either he conquers the world or the world will conquer him.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In De Cive (1651), Hobbes wrote of the sovereign’s duty to keep a firm grip on the universities lest they turn out seditious thinkers who, if clever, would cloud “sound doctrine” on which civil peace depended, or, if stupid, would stir up the ignorant from the common pulpit. Spinoza, who mistrusted clerics and churches, argued in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) that although a person’s beliefs were private and could not be controlled from outside, worship in public was a social matter. “If we want to obey God rightly,” he wrote in chapter, “the external practice of religion must be accommodated to the peace of the republic.”

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

[H]eaven help the elected official who, in the manner of Edmund Burke, tries to argue against the personal interest of his or her constituents or to communicate bad news.

Escaping Cultural Hypnosis - Startling Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist!

The Rogue Hypnotist

A hypnotic reality is any 'pseudo reality' (secondary reality) that exists in the mind of an individual or groups of individuals only: it has no supporting proof; it is founded on ideas and not experience.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 1 August 2021

 

To Move the World

Jeffrey D. Sachs

"Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again."--John F. Kennedy.

Henry Adams and the Making of America

Garry Wills

To emphasize from the outset the importance of Napoleon to the Jeffersonian administrations, Adams introduces him in the History's first volume with a Miltonic flourish: "Most picturesque of all figures in modern history, Napoleon Bonaparte, like Milton's Satan on his throne of state, although surrounded by a group of figures little less striking than himself, sat unapproachable on his bad eminence; or, when he moved, the dusky air felt an unusual weight" (227).

The Collected Works of Henry Adams

Henry Adams

History had no use for multiplicity; it needed unity; it could study only motion, direction, attraction, relation. Everything must be made to move together; one must seek new worlds to measure; and so, like Rasselas, Adams set out once more, and found himself on May 12 settled in rooms at the very door of the Trocadero. [From The Education of Henry Adams.]

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

“In short,” said Rousseau, “it is the best and most natural order for the wisest to govern the multitude, as long as it is certain that they govern for its benefit and not for their own.”

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Despite the threat—or rather because of it—we’re focused. The potential for someone getting hurt is the wedge that forces us into coordination.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

[O]ur nervous systems can really only issue two commands: tension or release.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

“In non-linear systems [and surely a life is a nonlinear system] tiny, seemingly trivial differences in input can lead to huge differences in output.… Chaotic systems are not predictable [and surely unpredictability, too, is a characteristic of life] but they are stable in their irregular patterns.” Chaos theory gives great importance to “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”

The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus

Gary Lachman

The difference between the Gnostics and the Hermeticists is that Hermetic man doesn't want to escape from the world, but to realize his full potential within it, in order to embrace his obligations, so that, as Hermes tells Asclepius, he can 'raise his sight to heaven while he takes care of the earth'.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 27 December 2020

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal. ---John F. Kennedy.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The historian’s business is with fact; and there are no future facts. The whole past and present universe is the field of history, to its remotest parts and in its most distant beginnings. Over this field the historian is absolutely free to range in whatever direction he will, limited not by his ‘authorities’ but by his own pleasure. For the maturity of historical thought is the explicit consciousness of the truth that what matters is not an historian’s sources but the use he makes of them.

The Complete Works of William Walker Atkinson

William Walker Atkinson

When the mind is mastered by the will, then may new territory be conquered.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Anxiety disorders occur when autonomic systems bypass the mind and hijack the stress response. The emotions that created neural symbols in the first instance were so powerful, and tied together so tightly, that they hardwired stress into the patients’ systems.

War and Peace and War

Peter Turchin

It is important not to overestimate our understanding even of simple agrarian societies. Applying history’s lessons to the present day presents even more difficulties because we live in a different world from the one of the Assyrians, the Romans, and the Mongols. Abundant food and energy, rapidly developing technology and science, mass media, the World Wide Web, and the mobile phone make any direct comparisons between historical agrarian empires and the modern industrial states problematic. On the other hand, modernity did not remake human nature.

Thoughts of the Day: Monday 28 September 2020

 

Alas, in 2020, one story about our collective future that’s becoming increasingly ubiquitous— and maybe even appealing to those inclined to resignation— starts with the opening line “we’re doomed” (or, in the vernacular, that we’re “fucked” or “screwed”). I hear this kind of declaration from a substantial and rapidly growing proportion of the students I teach. I respond to these young people by saying, as I say to Ben and Kate, that humanity is in fact doomed only if we collectively choose to be doomed.

--Thomas Homer-Dixon

For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

John F. Kennedy

Oddly enough, I notice that since things got really bad, everyone I meet is less dismayed.

--C.S. Lewis (around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation)

To regain our full humanity we have to regain our experience of connectedness with the entire web of life.

--Fritjof Capra

A Review of To Move the World: JFK's: Quest for Peace by Jeffrey D. Sachs

In this book well-known economist and public intellectual Jeffrey Sachs moves from the world of economic development and environmental concerns to an examination of how John F. Kennedy’s thought and rhetoric changed the dynamic of the Cold War. Sachs apparently came to this project through his friendship with Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy's primary speechwriter. Also, I suspect that Sachs came to the project because of his own quest to alter the dynamics in the world about global poverty, sustainable economic development, and ecological stewardship. In this book Sachs doesn't break any new historical ground. His main concern is to examine how the interplay of experience and rhetoric shaped the course of events both before and after the Kennedy administration.

Sachs notes that Kennedy had some important role models for his rhetoric and perceptions. First and foremost among these role models was Winston Churchill. However, his model was not simply the pugnacious Churchill of 1940 who defied the Nazis, but also the postwar Churchill, who, while warning of the spread of communism, also spoke in favor of peaceful talks. Perhaps in Churchill’s less eloquent but most apt words, more “jaw-jaw” and less “war-war”. This attitude of conciliation was carried forward by Dwight Eisenhower. Sachs notes a couple of Ike's speeches that struck a conciliatory note and that appreciated the dangerous dynamics that were developing between the US and the USSR. The most famous of Ike's speeches was his farewell speech, which Sachs describes is only one of two presidential farewell speeches that bears remembrance (the other was George Washington’s). In Ike's farewell speech, he warned of – indeed I think coin the phrase of – "the military industrial complex". Ike understood that there were strong pressures in the US (and certainly within the USSR as well) that pushed for military confrontation as a part of a profit and power seeking engine driven by defense contractors and the military. Roughly contemporary with Kennedy’s time in office was the papacy of Pope John XXIII, whose encyclical Pacem In Terris (Peace on Earth) provided another eloquent voice speaking out in favor of peace and justice. Kennedy was thus not alone on his perceptions and hopes, and he carried forward a line of predecessors and contemporaries from whom he could gain wisdom and assistance.

Sachs doesn't dodge the fact that Kennedy made the Cold War worse by the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion that occurred shortly after he took office. In another one of history's "what if's", historians of wondered if Ike would've had the good sense to have pulled the plug on the Bay of Pigs invasion, or whether he would have gone whole hog with the invasion. Kennedy chose halfway measures that embarrassed the US, made Castro more belligerent, and that suggested to the USSR that some further intervention on behalf of their Cuban comrades was necessary. Sachs details how Khrushchev developed his harebrained scheme to put offensive missiles in Cuba with the thought of revealing the fateful come play at a party Congress scheduled in late 1962 (shades of Dr. Strangelove here). This scheme led to the Cuban missile crisis, where humankind came within an eyelash of worldwide catastrophe. Credit goes to both Kennedy and Khrushchev for avoiding a nuclear Armageddon by backing away from the demands of hardliners. Kennedy had to deal with Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay (the model for Stanley Kubrick's general Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove). Khrushchev obviously had his own people to deal with as well.

After this harrowing experience, Kennedy chartered a new course to try to ease the tensions of the Cold War. His renewed concerns with this subject  eventually led to his June 1963 speech at American University that has since been dubbed "The Peace Speech". Kennedy laid out the need for renewed efforts to avoid war, efforts that were neither naïve nor impossible to achieve. This included a voluntary suspension of nuclear testing so long as no other nation engaged in tests of their own. Kennedy followed up the next day with a major speech on civil rights where, I believe for the first time, he described the civil rights movement in terms of a moral imperative. These two speeches, perhaps more than his better-known inaugural address, highlight of Kennedys’ rhetorical gifts and moral vision.

Sachs does a good job of carefully examining Kennedy's rhetoric. For instance, Sachs shows how effectively Kennedy used the rhetorical device of antimetabole, the Greek term referring to the repetition of words in transposed order (e.g., “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”) A great deal of credit for Kennedy’s rhetorical success goes to his aid Ted Sorensen, who wrote the first drafts and worked revisions in tandem with Kennedy. As a team, it will come up with signature ways of speaking and arguing that proved eloquent and effective. Kennedy was able to get the Soviet Union to the bargaining table, the parties agreed to a partial nuclear test ban treaty (underground testing was still allowed), and, most notably by the standards of today, he was able to get overwhelming Senate approval for the treaty. This was one of the highlights of Kennedy's congressional efforts. As we know, no civil rights legislation and no economic stimulus bill were enacted until after Lyndon Johnson became president and oversaw those efforts. While Kennedy's rhetorical gifts are undoubted, I still have the sense that without Johnson, the major civil rights legislation and perhaps even the economic stimulus Kennedy sought would have been sidetracked by Congress. As we know from our experience with President Obama, formal rhetoric that artfully and clearly sets forth a vision for possibilities is important, but not sufficient to effect real change. The trench warfare of congressional approval is also necessary to translate positive visions into law. Nevertheless, one can't leave this book without appreciating the skilled vision that Kennedy and Sorensen set forth.

Sachs spends a little bit more time on the post-Kennedy Cold War, and especially noteworthy is the period in the early and mid-1980s when Ronald Reagan and the hard core Republican right wing adapted an extremely confrontational attitude toward the Soviet Union. This attitude was perceived by the Soviet leadership and reciprocated. In hindsight, the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger efforts for détente are much more rational and reasonable. Reagan supporters argue that Reagan's rhetorical and military build-up in confrontation with the Soviet Union led to the downfall of the Eastern block and eventually the Soviet Union. But this argument should be subject to a lot of skepticism and should be rejected without a more persuasive argument made through a careful historical analysis than I’ve yet seen. The fact is, the doomsday clock that measured the threat to human well-being crated by nuclear war (now I think subject to other factors, such as ecological catastrophe) moved up very close to midnight again during a period in the 1980’s. However, once Reagan perceived a change in Soviet attitudes in the person of Gorbachev, Reagan's very effective rhetoric changed into one of conciliation and the need for rational consideration of the parties’ mutual need to avoid nuclear war and threatening confrontations. Neither Kennedy nor later Reagan dropped his strong stance of anti-Communism, but both came around to a much more sensible position. (Kennedy was more constrained by the extreme political right wing than was Reagan, who, like Nixon going to China, had a degree of credibility for a changed attitude toward the USSR that no Democrat could gain in order to achieve the changes the Reagan fostered.)

In my continued reading reflecting back on the presidency of John F. Kennedy, this book was a worthwhile addition. I thought it might be an exercise in hagiography, but instead, I found it a measured consideration of Kennedy and the importance of his and his predecessor’s rhetoric in defining the conflicts of the Cold War and thereby limiting the potential for a nuclear war. Perhaps because of my primal Republican background, I've never been an unabashed Kennedy admirer. His record was mixed, but I have gained a sense that the man grew during the course of his presidency and that the tragedy of his assassination did rob the world of his potential. Would he have avoided the deep entanglement of the Vietnam War? Would he have been able to forward the program of civil rights as effectively as did Lyndon Johnson? Would changes brought about by the initial efforts in diffusing the largest tensions of the Cold War have continued? All these “what if?” questions remain as tantalizing possibilities that will never receive a definitive answer. The only sure thing is the actual past; the future—or alternative futures—are marked by uncertainty. So with Kennedy. We should examine carefully his accomplishments, his failures, and the gifts he left behind, which though all too few, are nonetheless significant. I think Sachs performs an important service in this book in acknowledging that heritage and challenging us today to find similar instances where we can understand and improve our world through our rhetoric and politics.

A Review of 11.22.83 by Stephen King

The fantasy of time travel has always intrigued us. In modern times, perhaps beginning with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards, to HG Wells’ The Time Machine, on to Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, we have read fictions that explore the weird but familiar world of time travel. Similarly, the popular medium of television, through such shows as Star Trek, have explored the imaginative possibilities of this fantasy. Stephen King praises writer Jack Finney for his book Time After Time as an outstanding example of a time travel novel. In 11.22.63, Stephen King tries his hand at the genre with excellent results.

Probably anyone old enough to be in school on November 22, 1963 has indelible images from that day seared into their brain. This is the date that John F Kennedy was assassinated. It was a national trauma in my lifetime matched only by the trauma of 9/11 for traumatizing our collective and individual psyches. I remember vividly my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Handley, coming in and saying to us “I have some bad news. The president has been shot." That was all the information we received at first, and when the bell rang, we were sent to different rooms for our reading groups. Mine was on the main floor of the old fifth and sixth grade building, where a large old-fashioned radio sat in a small room. The volume on the old radio was turned up probably as loud as it could go. I recall the announcer saying “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States is dead." The station then immediately played the national anthem. My own reaction was one of shocked disbelief. Some of my classmates cried. I don't remember if I did, or if I prayed, but probably both. I think all were stunned. The following days were filled with a national grief and a ritual funeral that attempted to grasp the gravity of what happened.

What had happened, was that a lone, misfit of an individual by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald, had shot the president with a high-powered rifle. Oswald was later arrested only to be shot and killed himself a couple of days later by another misfit. This account of a lone gunmen acting out a deranged fantasy didn't seem to fit with what ought to have happened, that some deep conspiracy of great power must have been necessary to create so momentous an event. Thus, up sprung conspiracy theories that have spun almost endlessly since that date. Oliver Stone's JFK gave cinematic voice to those theories, but in the end, the conspiracy theories don't jibe with reality.

In an interview about writing this book, Stephen King says he initially started the draft in 1973, ten years after the assassination, but he reports that he put it away because of the demands on his time and the freshness of the wound that he was attempting to address. Now, a couple of years short of the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, he came out with a book that deals with this momentous date, the issues of time travel and what might have been, and the differences between the world of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In it attempting to address all of these different concerns, King has done a masterful job creating a sense of time and place in the recent—and to some of us, remembered—past. King does this in large measure through characters that we come to know and care about. I have to admit this is the first work of fiction by Stephen King that I've read (earlier listened to his book On Writing), and I must say ability as a story teller is well displayed here. (I have seen some movies based on his work, such as The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand by Me, all of which I found compelling.) I'd avoided King because I had always thought of them as a horror writer, but I see now that this does not do justice to the scope of his abilities.

The conceit of the book surrounds the discovery of a time warp in a small Maine town in 2011. An owner of a diner discovered the time warp some time ago and visited the past (always the same date and time in 1958), going back and forth in time. He eventually decides that his mission should be to avoid the assassination of JFK, and thereby avoid the national trauma that the Vietnam War visited upon the nation. (I think him terribly optimistic about this prospect.) However, he cannot get himself to the time and place necessary to confidently intervene to stop Oswald, so he recruits the main character, Jake Epping, to go back in his place. Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, reluctantly agrees to go back in time to try to derail this horrific event and other tragedies. In doing so, he travels to what in to us is now the strange world of the late 1950s and early 1960s in America. Epping’s self-imposed mission is made much more difficult by the fact that he falls in love with a woman who has her own past to deal with.

King doesn't dwell on weird theories of physics in support of his time travel conceit, but he does provide some common sense observations on what it might be like, such as the conclusion that the past doesn't want to be changed. No doubt true, but that doesn’t stop us from pondering the possibilities. Besides being a topic of interest for fiction writers, the “what if's” of history have tantalized serious historians and social scientists as well as fiction writers. What if Winston Churchill had not become prime minister in Great Britain in 1940? What if Hitler had successfully invaded? The number of possibilities are nearly endless once you crack open the past with an eye to changing it or imagining it happening differently. When we think philosophically and analytically about the past, we come up against the cold fact that the past is closed and fixed, while the future is open and uncertain (at least to some degree). When we try on mentally changing the past, we find, as the protagonist Jake Epping does, that things don't fit easily. The waves of consequence that emanate from any single fact disburse through the past creating a butterfly effect that can have nearly infinite repercussions.

I’m very glad I read this book because I found a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing. As we approach the anniversary of the assassination of JFK, there some other books I want to read as we try (continually, as with all good history) to assess JFK, the man and his presidency. Because his life and presidency were cut short at a time of such great change and trauma that we know came to pass in the United States during the period of about 15 years after his death, we wonder what would have happened had the assassin's bullet not struck. The fact is, we can never know, but we can wonder and ponder and argue these possibilities. It's not something worth doing because we can change anything in the past, but by casting the strongest possible light on the past, we can use the reflection to see a bit further where we might be going—and want to go—in the future.

By the way, if you are interested, the initial character who discovers the time warp and decides to look into the Kennedy assassination in the hope of avoiding it, thought there was a "95% chance" that Oswald acted alone. King, in an interview, opines, after having researched the matter very thoroughly, that that probability is close to 98 or 99%. History sometimes lurches in unforeseeable ways based on the acts of the least formidable of individuals or the random events of nature. This event seems to be such an instance.